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MailChimp Annual Report

mailchimp.com

178 pointsmistermcgruff47 comments

I'm jaded with almost everything - and I still respect the hell out of MailChimp every time I see something new from them. Great company.

It is pretty - but it triggers a pet peeve of mine. I spend 30 seconds trying to get this page to "do something". It is just the photo and a blue bar a the bottom. No indication of "scroll down". I wonder how many people give up. I was close.

Are you on an OS that hides the scrollbar? I scroll any time I hit a webpage anyway, but even if I didn't I would look over at my scrollbar and see that there is plenty of room to scroll before getting frustrated.

No it was there, I just don't tend to pay much attention to my scroll bar. It is way over there on the right.

The designer of this page went to a lot of effort to make the blue bar at the bottom fill the entire page, without letting any of the "below the fold" content show. If you resize the window, it grows.

I don't scroll pages unless there is a visual indication that something is there. I have a nice big screen, so many pages fit fine.

Maybe I'm just an idiot who can't operate a browser properly, but I think this is a case of designer seeking elegance over usability.

They probably wagered on people's tendency to use space bar to navigate pages.

Newer Macs hide the scrollbar when the pag is not actually scrolling.

right - that's why i missed it too. it was just the title that made me think "where's the report?". so i waited for something to happen (animation or so). next i tried to klick the page - maybe that would trigger the next slide? and finally i did scroll... nice butt by the way :-)

Interesting, I always use a scroll wheel mouse these days and inevitably when I hit the landing page of a web site I just assume there is more if I scroll down. So in this case it never occurred to me not to scroll down. I can see how you would miss that if you don't have this habit though.

it might be an exposure thing.A lot of sites posted here seem to use a design that lacks scroll hints, but I never run into that design philosophy in the "real" world.

I only figured out the scroll down after seeing your comment. I was about to give figuring out their site was overloaded or similar and this was their fail whale equivalent.

For the record Chrome for me uses a grey scrollbar with a grey handle. I have to look very carefully at a tiny part of my large screen to work out where the handle is. (I have no idea where Chrome picked up the wrong colours from.)

I only finally starting to try to scroll instinctively after being fooled by so many sites here. I wonder how common it is among less tech savvy people to not realize there's more too the page if it's so common here.

I'm sure larger tech companies would love to do annual reports this way. If only reporting the number of pizza slices satisfied SEC mandated financial disclosure requirements...

I'm in IT Audit for a Big 4 doing SOX 404 testing daily, it might as well be pizza slices, the current regulations completely miss the point that bog down productivity much more than pizza slices do!

White text on a light blue background is not what I would call beautiful.

What browser are you using? There's a background image.

Chrome. There is an image at the top of the page, but the 'App' section has a light blue background.

In fact, the following sections (support, operations, social, etc.) don't render at all for me - just a background with no text. Is the page not broken for anyone else?

edit: Interestingly, the page doesn't render for me above a certain width of around 1000px. Was this intentional? It's pretty bad design either way.

Agree with you, That's a negative point.

liking these 'annual reports'. got one from warby parker this morning as well: http://www.warbyparker.com/annual-report-2012

seems like a valuable exercise for startups to take

warbyparker.com has a good take as well. I like the way mailchimp's report/page though. I sure hope that we would see more in the startup world.

I'm interested in the 39,975 party poopers. Does that mean they kicked 39,975 users out for abuse?

Party Pooper mode in MailChimp is where the MailChimp monkey doesn't tell any jokes. By default, the mode is on so I guess these 39,975 went out of their way to turn off the jokes.

This breaks the paradigm of boring reports. The interface is fabulous. Clear and Concise.

Email delivery is almost commodity nowadays, This is what stands out (on top of a respectable quality of service of course)

They're in the commodity e-mail delivery service too -- Mandrill -- in addition to MailChimp. Pretty smart to reuse the hardware, staff and ISP/RBL relationships they established with MailChimp to also serve the SMTP-as-a-service market.

I use both. I have sendmail on my servers set to route everything through Mandrill, so my apps don't need to be aware of what software/service I choose for e-mail delivery. I send newsletters/product announcement type mails with MailChimp for the design templates and subscription management.

One could argue that services like Amazon SES make email delivery a commodity (though I'm personally not convinced of that).

But that's not the market Mailchimp is in. There's a lot more to sending newsletters than an SMTP server. Amazon SES is not their competition.

I suggested my company use MailChimp to send cold-lead emails for our sales department and it has worked phenomenally well.

Lots of closed deals, lots of profits and their website is very easy to use, especially with custom email templates.

What more can I ask? I hope they don't get feature bloat and in fact, remove some un-used features.

They are well worth your money.

I'm kinda surprised that Mailchimp let you send sales email even though they said that it's not allowed. Check their guide: http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/is-my-list-okay-to-use-in-ma...

Unless I'm misunderstanding your use of "cold-lead", I don't think MailChimp TOS allows these types of emails.

Last time I used them (over a year ago), you could only email people who had double-opted in to your emailing list, kind of making them not "cold-lead".

I may have misused the term 'cold-lead'.

Basically we have a form where interested people can request information, then we add them to our lists.

And it's TOS approved because MailChimp has an interview process when you signup and you explain what it is you're going to be doing with their services.

Does anyone know of a html template or framework built similarly to this? It's a unique layout.

looks like twitter's bootstrap fw with scrollspy in action here. not certain though.

I am really curious about the DMCA takedowns and subpoenas.

For the record I like the site and it ran wonderfully for me, although that seems to not be the case universally reading other comments.

I have a ~2700 subscriber email list with mailchimp and i want to pay $50/m but not until they make a decent plugin that isn't beta with heroku.

I'm surprised at New Zealand's stats. How on earth did that happen?

Name that font.

proxima-nova. You can use your browsers web tools too look at that stuff

Is that the font that's sort of a "cheaper" Helvetica? (In price, not quality)

Proxima Nova and Helvetica don't look alike much:

http://render00.fontshop.com/fonts/font_rend.php?idt=f&i...

The canonical Helvetica clones are Swiss721 (good) and Arial (terrible).

It's more a cheaper Gotham.

although if you look at the history, Proxima Sans (precursor to Nova) was released several years before Gotham: http://www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/proximanova.html

I don't know how much cheaper it is than real Helvetica. It's still pretty expensive.

Pretty, but it's a shame that there are a few inconsistencies in the data.

The most glaring one is that they have users in the Vatican City, but apparently no visitors from there.

There are two other things that don't quite add up that I've spotted. Exercise for the reader.

That all said, mailchimp is a great product.

If you mean the "Smallest countries with visits to MailChimp", Vatican is 0.17 sq miles, but it's not a country ;)

Yes, it is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_land_area

Most definitely is, and has been since Mussolini. Lateran treaty.

Ugh mail chimp. Isn't it incorporated in Belize? Former home of John "badass mutherfucker" McAfee? Home of endemic corruption from highest levels of government? And we hand over our email addresses? What?

The Rocket Science Group, LLC dba MailChimp, a Georgia limited liability company

Where did you get that?

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